Shopping Bags and Wrapping Ideas

One day I was cleaning our storage cabinets and found a number of shopping bags that have been stored away, forgotten.

Then an idea hit me.  Why not recycle them as “wrapping bags” for my Christmas presents this year?   I’ve read of others who have done it before and this post from 101 Grams of (Eye) Candy totally nailed that idea.

Her “reduce, reuse, recycle” stickers are so cool I have thought of ordering some from her to stick into my used shopping bags.

And then I saw this logo/patch at Mimi Kirchner’s website and knew at that instant that this is what I want to use:

So I decided to make my own stickers/tag to stick into the paper bags.  I printed the logo into colored construction papers and cut them.  Here’s how they looked like after:

To give it a “Christmas” feel, I pasted a small Christmas ribbon (also recycled from last year) under the patch before sticking it into the shopping bag.   Here’s a sample shopping bag from Muji with the patch:

It’s a good thing I printed the logo in different colors, it gave me the flexibility of choosing which color to put into which bag.   Like I could put an orange patch into a blue shopping bag like this one:

Or a blue patch on a red bag and a red patch on a green bag.

The color combinations are a-plenty and you can also make use of the colors as some sort of a label (i.e. blue for guys, red for ladies, and so on).

Here are my Christmas gifts all packed in a jiffy – thanks to my reused shopping bags!

For the gift tags, I just these reasonably Christmas gift tags that I found at National Bookstore.  50pcs with 10 designs (that’s 5 gift cards per design) for only P69.75!

I hope that my family and friends (and godchildren too) will appreciate this “go green” concept and try it on their own too.  It’s also a great way to reduce clutter in your home, too.    You can also be a little more creative with the reused shopping bags by adding more striking ribbons or scrapbook stickers.

Now, just a bit of a reminder to those who will go into recycling mode this Christmas: recycling shopping bags (to use as gift bags) is okay, but recycling gifts is totally a different matter hehehe!

I hope you enjoyed this post.  Have a great Sunday, all!